Peaces Like Us - Half-Life

Mod Resource Syndicated Review

Rating: 5/5
Good: Fun story; Xenizens are friends; decent length.
Bad: No new models; textures are old; lacks new concept.

Review:
Peaces Like Us is by one of the same people who brought you Sweet Half-Life, KS. The story is that after the fall of Black Mesa, mankind and Xen became friends. Thus, there is no hostility between the two races. So who do you fight? The Marines! They’ve come to Xen with a vengeance and are out to kill you, your fellow scientists, and the flora and fauna of Xen. Suit up Gordon, you’re going to take a bruising.

I’ll start with the story, since I liked it. I’m not a huge fan of duking it out with aliens, so fighting only Marines was a nice change. It was also really cool seeing how the Xen creatures acted without hostility toward you. I mean, we’re all very familiar with the alien slave’s green bolts of electricity, but did you know they can also operate computer terminals? Or the friendly Big Momma. She can destroy crates that are in your way. But I digress. Another thing I liked about Peaces Like Us was the length. It’s not as long as some of the others, but its long enough to net you a couple hours worth of playtime. You can only pack in so much gameplay into an 8MB package. The maps are constructed well, and there certainly is a variety of maps for you to explore. Inside a building, it seems like you’re on earth, but take one look out the window and you’ll realize the environment outside is not one to venture to without an HEV suit. Later in the game you will run into some maps that could make you sick. I’ll just say things are spinning and get to be upside down before you know it.

While Peaces Like Us is constructed well, has a good story, and is a blast to play, it lacks some originality. How many mods are there where you are Gordon Freeman, and have to kill everything in order to save yourself and your colleagues. The only different thing about Peaces Like Us is that Xen is friendly. Not that it isn’t fun, but Night at the Office was a great mod that took a different approach. That said, there aren’t any new weapon models or enemies for you to fight either, and the textures used in the mod are pretty dated. I’m pretty sure they are from 1998 when Half-Life came out.

Like Sweet Half-Life, Peaces Like Us was built for the non-Steam version of Half-Life, however, creating a folder called ‘wca_hl’ (its in the readme…I didn’t name it) under the \half-life\ folder in the Steam directory, and unzipping the contents into it, will allow you to play Peaces Like Us on Steam.

In the end, if you’ve played all the other Half-Life 1 mods, and want some more, I say download Peaces of Us. You’ll have a good time.

Copyright:
This review was written by Kyle Johnston and first appeared on Mod Resource and is republished by permission

The only thing I liked about this mod is the Gargantua helping gordon.

Another great mod… one of my personal favorites, in fact. This one is built on the premise that you immediately established peaceable relations with the Xenizens after the resonance cascade. Excellent and innovative mapping and gameplay abound in this mod… many areas feature hybrid Xeno-Human technology that’s very interesting to look at. The areas in which Xenizens actually actively help you or fight alongside you are well-done, but are too few and far-between… I would have liked to have seen many more. There are very few parts of this mod that I would actually consider “bad.” One of them is a pump station in which you have to complete a jumping-type puzzle that seems more suited to a Super Mario Brothers game. Another is the transition into the “Anotherworld” chapter. While the chapter itself was very interesting, I felt that the transition into it was fairly jarring… in addition, the level itself was obviously not as serious as the rest of the mod, which seemed fairly out of place. Overall, Peaces is a very satisfying gameplay experience. And if you like it, go check out its spiritual predecessor, Half-Life 2’s “Mistake of Pythagoras.”

niiiiice mod!

finished it in less than 1 hour.